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Adeel uz Zafar is an emerging contemporary artist from Pakistan who is deeply committed to creative expression through experimentation. Born in 1975 in Karachi, Pakistan, Adeel completed his BFA from National College of Arts (NCA) Lahore in 1998, he later returned to Karachi and joined Karachi School of Arts as an instructor.

Adeel started his early career as an illustrator that gave him considerable experience of working with the finest and reputable publishing houses in Pakistan, and provided him the opportunity to make his contributions to a multitude of academic curriculum text books. He mentions his sojourn in the suburbs of Gilgit momentous, where he went as a national illustration consultant for Northern Areas Education Project. The unavailability of conventional art material in that rural and remote area led him to investigate into substitutes for paints and surfaces. Having developed the engraving technique on the exposed photographic sheet by using paper cutter, he scratched drawings onto them mostly based on empirical observation and by modifying them in his signature graphic style. This is something which he considers, has made his place in the contemporary Pakistani art scene.

Discourse (Diptych) - Engraved Drawing on Vinyl

He joined Indus Valley School of Art in 2008 where he exhibited his work, almost after a complete decade from his first college display, in the IVSA Faculty show. The show at V.M. Art Gallery, Karachi in 2009 was a turning point in Adeel’s career which catapulted him into the league of emerging artists of Pakistan. He came up with a humongous scale this time, retaining his hold on the meticulous skill and the objects he made an illustration history with. These props were singular, fluffed cuddly toys, very symbolically wrapped in gauze bandage. He engraved them on large adjoined pieces of plastic vinyl sheet coated with emulsion and acrylic gel. The small toy was blown up to a monstrous size with a pitch black background, and the intricately manifested concealing weave of the cloth opened many connotations regarding furtive and ambiguous identity.

This style and technique was further experimented through a group show of four artists at Art Chowk-the Gallery, Karachi, titled ‘Being a Man in Pakistan’ (2009) – which has initiated a dialogue for the artist to reflect upon various issues, both social and political at times out of the box.

The Lion At Rest - Engraved Drawing on Plastic Vinyl Surface

The Lion At Rest - Details

The Lion At Rest - Details

Adeel associates his childhood memories and his perpetual dealing with subjects for children as the core of his imagery development. He symbolizes this bandaging manipulation as the delusive ipseity. He alters the dainty characteristic by transforming the identity of the object, driving it into a rather serious orientation. Whereas, his flamboyant command over the painstaking patterned strokes may appear principled to miniaturesque craftsmanship.

Recently, Adeel has participated in both national and international art exhibits such as the RM Naeem Residency, Lahore, Pakistan, ‘On the brink’ at Fost Gallery, Singapore and at Slick Art, Paris. He has also been selected for an exhibition showcasing a decade of a new wave of Pakistani artists who have contributed to the ever growing diverse vocabulary of contemporary art that has evolved from South East Asia ‘The Rising Tide – new directions in art from Pakistan 1990-2010’.

Adeel uz Zafar currently works and resides with his wife Nehdia and two children in Karachi.

Jonathan Bartlett is a New York based illustrator with a knack for metaphor and clever stories.

Growing up I certainly didn’t consider picture making or storytelling to be a means to an end. I didn’t even know what the word ‘illustration’ meant until I was a junior in college.

One day I told my teachers I wanted more creative freedom so I was going to be a graphic designer; they laughed at me…quite literally. In turn this made me really mad so I looked again at the list of art majors, saw illustration and in an instant said ‘fine, I’ll be an illustrator”. And that was that, a classic case of the tell-me-I-can’t-do-something…

I’m so full of praise for the Latin American art and design that I wish to go there and actually spend some time. I admire it not because I like it or have built a taste for it over the time but because it is genuinely inspiring, mature and unique. It has its own flavour, whether it is typography, illustration or graphic design, I always came across something stunning from that part of the world.

Dado Queiroz’s work is a statement of brilliance in terms of its style, identity and potential. Born in Curitba (Brazil) in 1980, he currently works at DDB in São Paulo.

Dado Queiroz

So, let’s talk about you. How it all started?
I studied ‘Architecture and Urban Planning’ for one and a half year, until I drop it to start doing freelance illustration projects. It didn’t work out quite so well, so I started studying Graphic Design in 2000, finishing in 2003.

After that I started a small solo studio with only me and occasionally my wife at that time (I got married in 2004). Then the studio got a little bigger, when I invited my good friends Anderson Maschio and Beto Janz to be partners. It was called ‘estudiocrop’. Later on, Renan Molin joined too, still as an intern, and became a good friend of all of us.

In the end of 2006 Renan had to focus on his graphic design course’s final project, Beto had some issues with his personal life and so did I, as I got divorced, so it seemed like we should take some time off. A time from which we never got back, as we decided to end the studio. Each one of us took a separate path: I ended up coming to DDB Brazil, from where I was laid off about one year later. Me and Renan then tried to get estudiocrop back together, but it didn’t work out as we expected. So a few more months down the road I came back to São Paulo and rejoined DDB once more.

What keeps you going?
What keeps me going on in my personal life are the good times, the laughter, some Seinfeld episodes, good beer, greasy food, learning how to play the guitar, music, travelling and stuff like that. Professionally, it is almost an addiction to that feeling you get when you finish a piece that you think is good. This and some nice people you get to know along the way, the evolution of the work, the expressiveness that any graphic piece can carry, the money (yes, the money, why not?) and, more recently, a new pleasure giving lectures and conducting workshops.

Your unique style – how it evolved to what it is now?
I wouldn’t call it unique, although I tend to get feedback from people talking about ‘my personal style’. I guess it came along when I started focusing more and more on what I like to do when designing something or making an image, and not so much on what people expect or what is trendy or strategically correct right now. I figured, since I’m going to spend some 75% of my waking hours working or doing work related stuff, I might as well do what I like. After all, it’s my life going down the drain and I don’t want to spend it feeling frustrated or angry or whatever.

So, as it turns out, I like to draw letters, to try expressive compositions and to shade stuff a lot. So this ‘style’ is really just a natural development of what I like to do. There were no big plans to build a style. Or, rather, a ‘personal’ style just started to surface when I stopped caring about having a personal style – which to me makes perfect sense. If it’s your style, it’s something natural… it’s not something you can force to happen, right?

In technical terms, at this time, it is all basically Photoshop and my Intuos3 tablet. From sketch to finish it all happens there, including the vectors, that I started doing directly on Photoshop (but of course I still use Illustrator for all vector or for more complex vector work). And I say ‘at this time’ because the techniques I develop usually evolve from time to time, not really to get better or more efficient, but much more to avoid getting so damn tedious to do the same thing over and over.

Sort of a cliché question – what’s the source of your inspirations?
My inspirations are 95% out of the realm of design or illustration. And again, it’s not a noble pursuit like ‘I just want outside references and blahblahblah’. It’s much more because I find it a bit boring to see the same design/illustration pieces over and over on the internet or books, all very well done, but basically all the same. You see 300 images that are essentially the same, just done by different people for different purposes. I find it very boring. And not only that, I find it harmful to my own work, since it can influence me rather than just inspire. What I usually like to see is architecture, furniture, product design, photography, microscopic and other botanic/organic related photography (great for forms and natural patterns) and some type related imagery.

After my graduation from NCA in 1998 in Graphic Design, I decided to build my career around interactive media rather than following the mainstream. Having decided that, I found it quite difficult to find inspirational and motivational work within ‘New Media’ locally and/or regionally. At that time things within digital media space were taking shape and the industry itself was without a clear identity. I had done my very first website design project a year earlier in 1997 for a Lahore based IT firm called Techlogix, this was my entry point into interactive media design. My relationship with computer graphics actually started in 1992 with Harvard Graphics, Corel Draw (that I still prefer to use over Illustrator), layer-less Photoshop (that I initially didn’t like) and when we used to run Windows 3.1 from DOS to be able to run all those graphic applications!

Back then in Pakistan the IT industry itself was very small and scattered, and was mostly around hard-core software development than anything else. Pursuing my interest abroad wasn’t an option back then so what I left with was – Internet.

Oregon TimeWeb - Second Story

Things changed around the time when dot com bubble burst but, by that time, I was on solid grounds within digital media and that’s where I owe a ‘thank you’ note to two design studios – ‘Second Story’ and ‘Terra Incognita’. Their work inspired me to keep going within interactive media when I felt creatively trapped. Both studios specialise in online storytelling and building engaging user experience within a carefully chosen segment of digital marketplace, where I hardly find any mainstream digital agency’s presence. That might be because you need to have a kind of technical and design intellectual edge over others to be able to churn out the kind of projects these studios specialise in. I indeed learnt from their online projects, half a world away, that what a ‘user experience’ is actually like – when most of the design studios at that time were busy building fancy Flash intros.

Music Genres Table - Second Story

Gettysburg Address - Second Story

Their contribution to interactive media design is deeper than skin – away from commercial glitter, design nonsense and digital media clichés. They are those who took user interaction design to another level and pioneered online storytelling. It has been over 10 years since I first visited their websites and portfolios, but I still have the same level of respect to their work which even grows when every time I visit their new projects. These two studios formed an inspirational institution for me at a time when I was in a real need to look at something. They are like Bauhaus to me.